John Knowles and Kurt Vonnegut are about to get some postmortem love. Last week, Brooklyn indie publisher Ig Publishing announced a new series called “Bookmarked,” which will feature Knowles’s A Separate Peace and Vonnegut’s The Slaughterhouse Five. The concept is for writers to create short books about works that inspired them. Think of it as expanded Oscar speeches, but for books.
The first two titles, John Knowles’ A Separate Peace: Bookmarked by Kirby Gann and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: Bookmarked by Curtis Smith are slated for release March of 2016.

On April 17, Publishers Weekly interviewed Ig publisher Robert Lasner says, “it’s about how a book inspired [the writers] or turned out to be a stepping stone to some point in their lives.” The series will include titles by Stephen King and Christina Stead, written respectively by Aaron Burch and Paula Boma. In Lasner’s words, the series promises to be “a no-holds-barred personal narrative. . . . It can be a writer loving a book, or hating it after they’ve returned to it.”